‘Daredevil’ Recap, Season 2, Episode 7: The People v. Frank Castle

As leading with yesterday’s meme might indicate, “Semper Fidelis,” the seventh episode of Daredevil’s second season, was the most subduded and uneventful of the lot. Sure, the show attempts to ratchet up the drama in the beginning, marching the Punisher into court in slow-motion to tune of Inception-style BONNGGGGGGs, and positioning him in front of an American flag with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast. But hey, this is the Punisher we’re talking about. Subtlety is neither his strong suit, nor the strong suit of stories that wish to use his blunt-force allegory effectively.

These colors don’t run.

Neither, really, does his trial. Despite its legal-drama setup, the episode focuses less on courtroom pyrotechnics than on the behind-the-scenes planning sessions, false starts, and fights that Frank’s legal team gets into; all of these are essentially maguffins for further character development. Foggy, for example, is the member of the Nelson/Murdock/Page team least sympathetic to the Punisher and least enthusiastic about taking him on as a client, but now that it’s done he just kind of grins and bears it, throwing himself into the work of effectively representing the man no matter his personal feelings. With the help of Karen’s dogged research, he devises the hail-Mary pass upon which their strategy hinges: Get the medical examiner to admit to doctoring the Castle family’s autopsies on behalf of District Attorney Reyes, thus getting Reyes off their backs, getting closer to the truth, and earning a mistrial all in one fell swoop. So when Matt blows off strategy sessions, misses his opening statement, and involves Elektra in such a way that she renders the M.E.’s testimony inadmissible through witness tampering, Foggy’s understandably furious. “You wanted to take this trial!” he yells when his partner pleads not guilty by reason of nighttime vigilantism with his rich ex-girlfriend for his absenteeism. “Stop acting like these things just happen to you! No one’s making you go out all hours of the night fighting bad guys, and nobody makes you lie to your friends, over and over again. Elektra is not the problem, Matt. You are.” He wanted nothing to do with the case, and now his partner, who did, is taking none of the weight.

Karen, by contrast, is taking plenty. As the member of the team with the best rapport with Frank, she spends hours alone with him, attempting to develop a strategy for his defense. She suggests PTSD, which he rejects as an insult to soldiers who really suffer from it: “It wasn’t on a battlefield. That’s not where my life went to shit.” But more importantly, she gets to know Frank, empathizes with him, walks in his shoes, even sees his side. “Just for a minute,” she says to Foggy, “try to be Frank Castle. To be solely fueled by a single cluster of seconds, one moment in your entire life, and every time you close your eyes you relieve that moment, and every time you open them, you find only the briefest peace before you realize that that nightmare is real. That nothing has changed.” She goes on to cite Frank’s specific circumstances, but as of that moment she’s describing the foundational traumas of countless characters across the Marvel Cinematic Universe, herself included. Her sympathy runs so deep that she all but endorses his actions, leading to the rapid end of a working date with Matt back at his apartment.

And Matt…well, yeah, Matt’s keeping busy.

Don’t worry, it’s not what it looks like. As Elektra gangpresses him into continuing to help investigate the yakuza, they work their way from a corrupt professor who does their translation and encryption, to a freight train filled with dirt rather than cargo and used as bait to trap them, to a construction site on the west side with what appears to be a bottomless pit inside. Creepy.

But he’s walking a narrow line with his adventurer ex. He’s furious with her for showing up at his apartment unannounced—the real reason he cut his date with Karen short—and for roughing up their star witness in what she thought was a favor to them. At the same time, their physical intimacy is impossible to deny, even when it’s non-sexual. They show off the scars they’ve earned since college (they know each other’s bodies well enough to recognize the newcomers), and Matt soothes himself to sleep by listening to her breathe in one of the show’s sexiest uses of his superpowers so far. It’s strong and restrained writing, given the level of maudlin melodrama this kind of amour fou could produce in lesser hands. (Or on Jessica Jones, though I repeat myself.) The question is how this relative lull in the action will effect the home stretch. The season’s been so strong so far that my hopes are pretty high.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO‘s The Leftovers for Decider.